A diary is a small journal a person keeps in which they note their innermost thoughts, what they think of their neighbors, which boys they’d like to kiss and the location of all the bodies are common themes found within diaries. Though most people will stop updating them by the age of 13 or will eventually realize that Facebook is a much more awesome way to vent their frustrations, some people keep them long, long past when they should have stopped. Robert Shields was one such man.
By the end of his life Robert’s diary clocked in at a brain melting 37 million words. Lots of people write diaries, maybe he just wrote in it every single day? Well yeah, he actually wrote in it about 400 times a day. From 1972, up until a stroke in 1997 Robert wrote in his dairy every 5 minutes, noting every little thing that happened to him. And we mean, every little thing. How much he pooped, stuff he dug out of his toenails, everything. If it happened, Robert noted it down.
However, here’s where it gets depressing, Robert is believed to have suffered from a condition that causes an overwhelming urge to write (Hypergraphia), meaning that Robert’s epic diary was probably the result of a mental illness. A mental illness no one helped him with in lieu of letting him write himself half to death so they’d have another entry in the Guinness book of world records. Damn, some people are cold.